Perverse Cities

Book Summary

Urban sprawl — low-density subdivisions and business parks, big box stores and mega-malls — has increasingly come to define city growth despite decades of planning and policy. Urban planning has focused on curbing sprawl by treating its symptoms — aiming to regulate more compact, livable urban forms into being. Most urbanists view sprawl as an expensive and unsustainable pattern of development. Yet a few defend it as the natural expression of the market neutrally responding to consumer demand and as a reflection of consumers’ lifestyle preferences.

In Perverse Cities, Pamela Blais argues that both views fail to recognize market distortions and flawed policy that drive sprawl. She shows that, as a result of crude public policies, a wide range of urban goods and services are subject to inaccurate price signals, including housing, non-residential properties, transportation and utilities. Mis-pricing creates hidden, “perverse” subsidies and incentives that promote sprawl while discouraging more efficient and sustainable urban forms — clearly not what most planners and environmentalists have in mind.

Perverse Cities makes the case that accurate pricing and better policy are fundamental to curbing sprawl and shows how this can be achieved in practice through a range of market-oriented tools that promote efficient, sustainable cities.

Reviews

Western Planner
A review of Perverse Cities in the US magazine Western Planner can be found here. Reviewer Patrick L. Dugan recommends the book as “required reading for any planner or finance official involved in managing urban development”, underlining that the analysis presented in the book is as relevant for US cities and towns as it is for Canadian.

Harvard Design Magazine
Check out the review of Perverse Cities by Matthew J. Kiefer in the new issue of Harvard Design Magazine No. 34. The reviewer sees Perverse Cities “not as another polemic, but a thoroughly researched, carefully reasoned, and studiously non-ideological account of how hidden subsidies distort land-use decisions in favour of sprawl”.

David Amborski
“This highly practical book will give urban policy makers a better understanding of the implications of a number of tools available to them. It is a welcome addition to the debate over the use of regulatory policy as opposed to tax/subsidy measures to address land use issues and outcomes.” – David Amborski, Professor, School of Urban and Regional Planning, Ryerson University

The Donner Jury
“Analytical and detailed in its approach…consistently daring in challenging accepted views of the causes of and solutions for urban sprawl”.

Terry Pender
“Pamela Blais’ book Perverse Cities is the best explanation I have read for the persistence of urban sprawl. A must read for urbanists”. http://twitter.com/terrypender